Prerequisites: Principles of Code 2Prospective students with other prior programming experience will need to pass a placement test to be eligible for this course offering. Please contact us here should you wish to have your child take our placement test.

In the physical world, many people solve problems through analogy - rehashing and reusing solutions to old problems we have seen to new problems that look and feel familiar.

In computer science, we study how to do this through what computer scientists call abstraction. Code Campers will learn to bend the Python language to fit the context of the problems they are solving. This approach is what enables financial coders to create programmatic representations of stocks and bonds to model market prices, and bioinformatics researchers to code up the human genome to study its properties.

“Coding” is synonymous with “programming”. It refers to the art of writing computer code, which are instructions
that a computer can follow to solve problems. Practically every facet of technology that we encounter in
our daily lives - from online banking systems to video games on our iPhone, from the GPS systems we rely
on navigation to the security systems that protect our homes and offices, is created from code.

Communicating with a computer requires the use of a language, just like how communicating with another human
being involves the use of a language like English or Korean. The difference is that writing code for a computer
in a particular language is a little like speaking to somebody who is absolutely particular about grammar
and punctuation - any deviation from a language’s rules results in a computer not being able to accept the
programmed instructions. Different computer languages are well-suited to doing different tasks. For example,
JavaScript is the undisputed lingua franca of the web, LISP is used extensively by NASA and in Artificial
intelligence research while C and FORTRAN finds its adherents in high finance especially in the field of
high frequency trading.